Luo Cing (real name Luo Qingzhe) was born in 1948 in Qingdao. His parents took him to Taiwan in 1949.
In his youth, he was trained in traditional painting styles including Northern Song school landscape and Southern School splashed ink, by renowned artists Puru and Ren Bo-wu. Luo attended Fu Jen Catholic University Department of English. After classes he would read modern poetry and study modern Western painting. In 1972 Luo published a series of poems written during college called "How to Eat a Melon", which was positively reviewed by poet Yu Kuang-chung. That same year Luo went to the University of Washington, Seattle, to study a master's degree in Comparative Literature. After obtaining his degree, he returned to Taiwan, teaching at the English and fine arts departments of National Taiwan Normal University.
Luo Cing was an academic and an artist, equally comfortable with the theory or practice of art, and he was a poet at the same time. He was a teacher, writer and consummate ink and wash painter.
For Luo, his main motivation for painting was the expression of his personal thoughts and emotions, as well as communicating with people and putting across his unique points of view. Luo was grounded in traditional style but at the same time an innovator, who developed a new modern theoretical framework and style of ink and wash painting, by incorporating new styles and techniques.
One Man’s Cultural Revolution– the Battle between Dragon and Tiger in the Mountains reveals the artist’s conversation with the self about how one should confront the tradition, inherit the tradition, and reform the tradition. He uses “coiled dragon and oil tree” as a metaphor to symbolize that if we absorb the tradition well, the tree can shelter us from the burning sun, but if we stubbornly preserve the tradition, the old tree will turn into a venomous dragon which traps artists inside the palace. Therefore, it is the artist’s primary concern to transcend himself from the red-wall battle between the dragon and the tiger.
Luo’s ink and wash paintings frequently featured lines from his own poems. He believed strongly that the written and painted sections of his pieces should have ‘synchronicity’, i.e. that the two elements should complement each other rather than be explanations of each other. This ‘poetry painting’ was a continuation of the traditional literati Northern Song school style of painting. Luo also sought to convey a feeling of contemporary style in the content and style of his art using the value system of the traditional painting style. By the mid-1960s there had already been a significant amount of debate around how to modernise ink and wash painting. In 1968 Liu Kuo-sung and others established the China Ink and Wash Painting Society and started holding exhibitions. The group updated ink and wash by incorporated styles and techniques from western abstract Expressionism. This movement was perhaps a great inspiration to a young Luo.
Luo's ink and wash paintings depict scenes of modern life using a traditional painting anaesthetic. Widely read in the classics of Western thought and trained in literature, Law had a unique interpretation of how to combine Western and Eastern ascetics and innovate with traditional painting. He proposed that the modern was an overall experience of new knowledge, new lifestyles and industrial culture and that good art was a product of the current moment and should reflect new visual experiences.
Chinese title: | 一個人的文化大革命(一):空山龍虎鬥 |
English title: | One Man’s Cultural Revolution |
Decade: | 2008 |
Medium / Classification: | ink painting and calligraphy |
Dimensions: | 137.1×410.5 cm |
Artist: | LUO Cing |
Life-span: | 1948 - |
Collection Unit: | Collection of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts |
Contact method for authorization: | Guide to the Use of Image Files and Data from the Online Collection Database |
Related Exhibition: | "The Pioneers" of Taiwanese Artists, 1941-1950 |
Related Work: | A Couplet of Landscape Painting UFO |